


Unsent

by WolfieOnAO3



Series: Before The Ides Of March [5]
Category: Raffles (TV 1977), Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: (sort of), Crime and Christmas, Epistolary, Le premier pas, Letters, M/M, Pre-Canon, School, The Ides of March - Freeform, Young Bunny, Young Raffles, school days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:53:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27996336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfieOnAO3/pseuds/WolfieOnAO3
Summary: Dear BunnyI’m afraid that this letter will never reach you. Letters which aren’t posted, or which, as this one shall be, are posted directly into the lighted fireplace, tend not to reach their intended recipients, except perhaps in fairytales. I'm not in a fairytale. And even if I were, I would certainly play the villain...A series of unsent letters between young Raffles and Bunny.Written for the CrimeChristmas 2020 Advent Prompt, 11: Letter.
Relationships: Bunny Manders & A. J. Raffles, Bunny Manders/A. J. Raffles
Series: Before The Ides Of March [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2136807
Comments: 9
Kudos: 11
Collections: Crime & Christmas 2020





	Unsent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chippa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chippa/gifts).



> Chippa, I'm gifting this to you, as it was your comment on _Between The Pages_ which set me to thinking! This nonsense is the product of that thinking.
> 
> Part 5 of _Before The Ides Of March_ \- this series is best read in order!

* * *

**_unsent_ **

**February 28th, 1883**

Dear Bunny,

I–

* * *

**_unsent_ **

**March 15th, 1883**

Dear Bunny,

How are you? Keeping well, I hope, and getting ready for the cricketing season ~~my boy~~!

For my part, my feet are now once again upon English soil, callooh, callay! I can tell you, Bunny, if I don't set foot on a ship again for another five years it'll be five too soon. I begin to think that the old punishment of deportation was based more upon the sailing part than the colonies part. I wonder whether convicts who continued their criminal lives Down Under were threatened with being sent back again? I can tell you that my return journey, lacking the excitement of the outbound, felt to me to have lasted for around fifty years, give or take a week. I am sure time passes more slowly at sea; I'm quite the old man now, Bunny! Anyway, other than being relieved to be off of the water, and aside from feeling the cold rather keenly, I am glad to be back in the old _patria._ Australia was ~~a disaster~~ ~~a Godsend~~ ~~not quite what I expected~~ very hot.

I hope that you had a merry Christmas, and an enjoyable birthday, Bunny. My Christmas was, as I’m sure you can imagine, quite novel. I didn’t spend it on the beach, but I did spend it ~~alone~~ in the sunshine! I confess to missing ~~your letters~~ ~~the old school~~ ~~_you_~~ frosty mornings and snowy vistas as I looked out across sunny Melbourne on December 25th. Did you get any snow in your neck of the woods?

I promised that I would write to you upon my return. That is what I am now doing, even though I ~~don’t think I ought to~~ don’t yet have a definite address. For now, I'm staying at lodgings ~~in London~~ ~~in the city~~ somewhere dull that I shan't bore you with the details of. I'm hoping to take up studying at Cambridge in the Autumn. It’s not Ruskin, but the Art Tripos is very good, and they have a first-rate cricket team. I’m certain I’ll do far better at Cambridge than I did at Oxford; and Harrie – you remember my sister? – has a pal up there, so I’ll have a friendly face to greet me. When I left for Australia, I was certain that my ‘Varsity days were at an end, but unexpected new opportunities have arisen since then, and–

...This is impossible.

* * *

**_unsent_ **

**April 10th, 1883**

Bunny,

I’m afraid that, due to certain ~~circumstances~~ ~~difficulties~~ ~~mistakes~~ events which have occurred, I shall be unable to continue ~~correspondence with you~~ ~~exchanging letters~~ ~~this friendship~~ writing to you. I really am sorry, Bunny, but it’s for the best, so–  
  


* * *

**_unsent_ **

**September 7th, 1883**

Dear Bunny,

I’m afraid that this letter will never reach you. Letters which aren’t posted, or which, as this one shall be, are posted directly into the lighted fireplace, tend _not_ to reach their intended recipients, except perhaps in fairytales. I am _not_ in a fairytale. And even if I were, I would certainly play the villain, and magical interventions rarely act on behalf of those poor devils; least of all to reconcile them with the innocent hero, and _especially_ not when such a reconciliation could only cause our great-hearted, delicate-minded young hero trouble just as he was about to set out on a bright path all of his own. No good would come of it, and though villain I may be, I’m not yet such a brute that I’d refuse to shield you from such a curse as all that, Bunny, even if it comes at the cost of something dear to myself. And so this letter won't ever reach you, and neither shall any other from me. I’m sure you’d disagree, especially without knowing all of the details, but trust me – it really is for the best.

I suspect you’re now asking, or would be asking were you reading this, why in that case I am writing this letter at all. I’m not sure I have a reasonable answer to that. Guilt, maybe? Possibly that potent mixture of loneliness and melancholic nostalgia for simpler times that so often drives smarter men to make stupid confessions, even if they are made in silence... Or perhaps it is only that I miss you, and hate to break a promise. It’s one year to the day that I boarded that ship to Australia. So much has changed, since last summer… Well, whatever the true reason is, the compulsion to write to you really is overwhelming, Bunny, and I have nearly done so several times since my return. In spite of the fact that I have had so much else to think about, and so much else to do over the past year, you've remained stubbornly occupying your own little niche at the back of my mind. As a great poet said, _is it not worth an hour to think of things that are well outworn?_ This, then, is my hour. After that I have to make peace with my decisions and _move on_. I have already done so for the most part; there are just a few loose ends I need to resign myself to never tying. You are one such tie, Bunny.

It’s nothing you’ve done. I wish I could tell you at least that much. It is all me, and entirely my own doing. In my more selfish moments I can almost convince myself to forget about the whole thing; convince myself that I might remain your pal, and write to you as though I'd never– Well, a lot of things have happened in the past eighteen months or so, Bunny. I wrote to you of the good things, of which there were many, but kept the bad out of my letters as much as I could. Not because I didn't trust you, but... I suppose it was a relief to have someplace that all of the tedious gloom couldn't touch, a sacred place other than _Veil’d Melancholy’s sovran shrine_ to which I might retreat. And in any case, what use was there in sharing my woes with you? It would only have worried you, and wouldn't have helped me a bit. As it was, your letters got me through some jolly dark hours, and your friendship means– meant more to me than I was ever able to comfortably or adequately express. The thought of never writing to you again, never seeing you– But it is precisely _because_ I care, you dear little rabbit, that I simply cannot justify letting you _remain_ as my friend. I’ve crossed lines, Bunny, that I ought never to have crossed, and, on the whole, I’m not at all certain that I regret crossing them. That almost troubles me more than the sin itself – old Dismas on the cross was repentant of his crimes right at the very last minute, and forgiven. Alas, he was a better man than me; or, perhaps, merely lacking in my conviction. Repentance, it would seem, is not in my nature. Forgiveness has never been something I’ve sought. _Alea iacta est._

None of this is to suggest that any of my circumstances were, or are what one might call _ideal_. I'm not a complete idiot. My problem was that I’d found myself fallen into the very _deepest_ of holes, with absolutely no above board way out. Naturally no-one of my acquaintance had the barest idea of this – I made certain of that. All else aside – and there are plenty of other reasons for a man to keep his personal affairs quiet, as I'm sure you can easily enough imagine – I refused to let Harrie discover the extent of the financial straits in which our father had left us. But straits they were, I make no bones about that, nor the fact that I did little to improve the situation; though not for want of effort. Everything I tried only made things worse! My father might have handed me the shovel, but I dug that hole as deep as it got all by myself. 

But then I dug myself out of it. 

All decent, sane people, should they have even an inkling of my situation, would doubtless conclude that I’m in a far worse position now than before – though I should like to see any of them profess the same noble ideals whilst standing in my shoes or with my former balance at the moneylenders'. Still, though I acknowledge that the solution I came up with is not of the sort to be discussed in company, polite or otherwise, nevertheless, I can’t fire up even a shred of regret for what I’ve done. Quite the contrary, I feel a perverse sort of pride in it, in much the same way one feels pride in scoring a century for the local team whilst bunking off school. It’s _wrong_ in the technical sense, and you remain distantly aware that you shouldn’t have done it, but a century is a century, and by Jove, did you ever play well! And now, so far from wishing to undo it, I've repeated it. I have compounded my sin, multiplied my crimes… Oftentimes the excusing of a fault makes the fault worse by the excuse, as the Bard said; this, at least, is a sin I can’t claim. I make no excuses for the things I have done. I'm _glad_ of them. Anxiety has fled, sorrow has withered at its root, and out of the ashes of disaster a villain in gentleman's garb has emerged, remorseless, relentless, and, importantly, quite out of debt. If one can't move Heaven, raise Hell, after all; and as it turns out, I've got a talent for that.

Now do you understand? I can’t very well let you associate with a chap like that, can I, Bunny! You are destined for far happier, simpler, more wholesome things, my boy. My life has become far too shadowy and complicated to involve you in it at anything more than the most superficial of levels, and you, Bunny Manders, are of the nicest type of disarming and the most dangerous sort of ingratiating. I can't keep you near and keep you out, so my only moral recourse is to keep you away.

Nonetheless, I dearly wish I _could_ write to you, at least to tell you I must cut ties. Although, if wishes are on the table, better yet I'd wish I didn’t have to cut ties at all, that I could keep you as my epistolary confidante and friend. I know you wouldn't turn me in; you wouldn't even, I expect, turn away from me, were I to come clean about the whole thing. In truth that's a great part of the reason I know I could never tell you, and why it’s better for me to simply step back. It was bad enough for me to rope you into breaking the rules at school as I did, and you went along with that with such pluck and such loyalty, without so much as batting an eyelash at anything I asked, that I have no doubt you should react in exactly the same way to far more serious confessions. You’ve already proven that, in fact, when you discovered what had gone on between me and– But it’s better not to speak of it. It’s better not to speak of _any_ of it; that’s rather the point. 

You're a nice chap, Bunny, and you deserve far better than to have a friend like me. 

So be angry at me. Despise me for never writing back, hate me for breaking my promise to you, and then forget me entirely. Go on to live the very best of lives, Bunny Manders. _Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit._

Sincerely yours,

A.J.R.

* * *

**_unsent_ **

**December 24th, 1883**

Dear Raffles,

It’s nearly Christmas, again. I still have your gift from last year, the Keats book. You’d be happy to hear that I read it most days, and now have good portions of it off by heart! I’ve lately been getting into a chap named Swinburne – do you know his poetry? I think you’d like him. I do. I was going to send you a book of his for Christmas, a Vest-Pocket edition, like the one you sent me, but…

Why haven’t you written, Raffles? I don’t mind if you’ve just forgotten, but I don’t have an address for you. I tried writing to Oxford, even though you told me not to, but my letter got sent back. I even convinced the school’s secretary to give me your home address, in case your parents, if you have them, or perhaps your sister, might have been able to pass a message on or… or something. But that letter got returned too. Someone else lives at your old house, now, and no one left any forwarding address.

What _happened_ Raffles? Where are you? I know you came back from Australia; I followed your success over there in all the papers, and they reported your safe return to England at the end of January. But after that you just disappeared. I know I shouldn’t be so _clingy_ about it, but it’s just that ~~I miss you~~ I really wanted to send you that poetry book. And talk to you about Keats, and my parents, and school, and I have _so_ much other news to tell you, Raffles – such as the fact that I got appointed editor of the mag' over the summer, just like you said I would! I wanted to have Dodo with me as my sub-editor, but of course he’s gone, so I have to make do with Carpenter. He's all right, and nearly as far gone on cricket as Dodo was, which is good for the Sports section, but he's nowhere near as funny. I suppose you don’t know about Dodo, do you? He moved to Australia in January. Why must Australia take away all the people I like? ….At least Dodo writes to me.

I don’t really know what else to say. I suppose if I knew I could really send this to you, I’d have oodles of things to write. I’d probably go on for pages and pages and bore you senseless. But really I’m just writing to myself, aren't I?

Well, in that case, if I am not writing to you at all, and I can say whatever I like – How _could_ you, Raffles? You _promised_! You promised you’d write, and then you _didn’t_ , and I don’t even know if you're alive or dead! I _hope_ something really bad has happened to you! If it has then I’ll forgive you for your silence, but if it hasn’t, then– then you can go to hell! You promised me. You _promised_ ! I trusted you! I trusted that you of all people wouldn’t– But now you’re gone, just like Dodo’s gone, just like everyone is _always_ gone, whilst I’m still here, stuck at his horrid, awful, putrid school which, were Dante alive today and living in England instead of Florence, would have been written into the _Inferno_ as an extra circle of _Hell!!_

I hate it there, Raffles. I hate it, and everyone in it. And I hate mathematics, and I hate Mr Scrafton, and I hate sports, and I hate the other boys –and I hate you!! I hate the whole boiling lot of it! And everyone hates me, at home and at school, and I wish I didn't care, but how can I not? The only people in the world who liked me at all have _left me._

Where are you, Raffles? I miss you so much. I don’t really hope something bad has happened to you, and I don’t hate you, either. I don’t hate you at all. I wish I did; it’d be so much easier to hate you. Because... Because the truth is I think I _love_ you, Raffles. Don’t worry, I’m going to burn this as soon as I’m finished writing it. No one else will ever, ever know. Never. I’m not an idiot. But if I can say it, if I can for just a moment pretend that I _can_ confess to you, and that in this imaginary world you wouldn’t hate me for doing it… I love you. And not like I love Dodo, or Shakespeare, or walking in the woods in the summer. I love you like Achilles loved Patroclus; like Antinous loved Hadrian; like Corydon loved Alexis. I love you like – like how _you_ loved _Kitty_. I’m _in love_ with you, Raffles. And I know you could never love _me_ , but that didn't matter, not as long as I could be your _friend._ I thought I _was_ your friend. But now you’ve stopped writing to me, so I suppose not.

I had this – dream, I suppose you’d call it, but a waking dream, an untethered fancy, like Keats wrote of, that you would show up at the very last Old Boys’ Match in July – the July just before I left school for good. I’d be eighteen and a half, and you’d be just turned twenty-two, and we’d be more like equals than we were before, both young men of the world, rather than schoolboys bound to the tyrannical hierarchic system that kept us from being the best pals I know we were destined to be. ...In my dream, the moment that you saw me again in person – and in my dream I'm always much prettier than I am in real life – you’d see me and realise that you had been slowly falling in love with me all this time; that over the course of us writing to one another you’d found in me a kindred spirit, a true pal, a _soulmate._ You would suddenly see what you have _secretly_ known all along, that I was long, long since being some silly, naive little boy, and had become a _man_ worth _knowing._ A man worth _loving_... 

...Sometimes in those daydreams I’m a girl. I'd have long, blonde curls piled fashionably beneath a sun hat, and rose-blushed cheeks, and damask skin and _no freckles_. I see myself standing in the sun by the edge of the cricket field in a beautiful pale pink dress, watching you play cricket, your whites gleaming against the green, your black curls wild and glittering in the sunshine. You would take every wicket and win the match for the Old Boys, really showing up those asses on the school’s first XI who think they’re all that, when none of them can so much as hold a candle to _you_. And then when play ended, you’d finally see me. You’d rush away from your cheering teammates to be at _my_ side instead of theirs, and you would sweep me up in your arms right in front of everyone, and propose to me right there and then. It would be just like a fairytale, and I’d finally get _my_ happily ever after. And then all of this – this horrible school, and the boys that bully me relentlessly, the teachers that bully me relentlessly, my parents always being so disappointed in me, all of that would just become part of my _story_ ; the hardships that make the reward at the end all the sweeter. I could put up with all of it, if it meant that in the end I got to be with _you._

...That looks terrible now that I’ve written it down. What’s _wrong_ with me! No wonder you stopped writing to me, this is– I’m– I shouldn’t think things like this. Much less say them, even to myself! And, God, not about _you_!

I ruined it all, didn’t I? No wonder you don’t want anything to do with me. ...Though you could have at least written to say goodbye. You could have at least–

...Well, I’m sorry I made you put up with me for so long. It must have been such a chore, feeling that you had to write back to some stupid little _child_ with such a– such an obvious infatuation. No wonder you stopped writing. I’m _glad_ you stopped! I don’t need to be patronised. Regardless of what you think, Raffles, I’m _not_ a child. I’m almost seventeen, I'm barely even younger than _you_. I don’t need your condescension. I don’t need _you!!_

I’m going to stop waiting for you to write. _I have put my days and dreams out of mind._ I think I’m going to give up on hoping altogether. Hoping makes everything so much worse. 

...The clock just chimed midnight. It’s Christmas Day.

Well, merry Christmas, Raffles, wherever you are. 

Merry Christmas, and goodbye.

Sincerely,

Harry Manders

* * *

**_unsent_ **

**December 10th, 1890**

Dear Mr Manders,

I hope that you don't take offence at my writing to you unsolicited; I admit that I’m banking on the remembered acquaintance of our youth overriding usual note-sending etiquette. I am Arthur J. Raffles; you were my fag throughout my final year of school, and, I should like to say, my pal for a short while, too.

I am writing as I have just recently heard that you made the move up to London at the end of September. I, too, am living in this bustling metropolis – and at a place not too far from the flat you have taken, if I’ve heard rightly!

I know that the city can be a lonely place for a chap fresh in, so I thought it might do you some good to see a friendly face. Consider this an invitation to come and dine with me at my Club, any time you like – if you like the look of the place, I can put you up for membership.

I’d love to see you, again, ~~Bunny~~ ~~Harry~~ old chap, after all these years. And as we’re practically neighbours, and almost old friends, please do call on me at my rooms whenever you like. I’m at the Albany. Any hour of the day, you'll be more than welcome to come up for a cup of coffee, a glass of whiskey, conversation, or anything else you might be--

...What are you playing at, Arthur? Have things really gotten _this bad_ , old boy? That you’re–

 _Leave_ _it_ _alone._

* * *

**Mr Harry Manders  
Flat 6, Mount Street**

_**March 12th, 1891** _

Dear Mr Manders,

A mutual acquaintance mentioned to me this afternoon that you expressed an interest in joining our little evening card game on the 14th. Please do come along, if you wish. I've rooms at the Albany; ask for Mr Raffles at the door, and the porter shall show you up. I'm more than happy for you to join us.

Sincerely,

Arthur J. Raffles

P.S. The fellow also said that you made brief mention of the fact that you and I were at school together, but you weren't sure whether I remembered you: Of course I remember you, my dear chap! And I'm deucedly glad to hear that you remember me. Though I must confess to being a bit surprised that little Harry Manders was looking to play baccarat. I suppose you aren't so little, anymore.

Please consider yourself invited to my rooms at any time you like, and for any reason. I look forward to seeing you again, Mr Manders, most earnestly. 

A.J.R.


End file.
